Viral Marketing
The term was actually coined by the venture capital firm of Draper Fisher Jurvetson to describe the phenomenon of a company funded in 1996 called Hotmail. Besides having a great name, Hotmail was hot because of the way it was marketed. It spread like virus, going from zero customers to over 40 million in only three years, increasing its subscriber base more rapidly that any country in the history of the world.

The key to Hotmail’s phenomenal growth was the free price tag and the fact that every e-mail contained the following tag line and an implied recommendation by the sender:
Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com

The more the service was used, the faster the word was spread. In 1998, Hotmail was sold to Microsoft for $400 million (original investment was $300 000). There are more successful products and franchises around that used principles of viral marketing (often unintentionally), for example Harry Potter, Ebay, ICQ, Amazon.com or The Blair Witch Project.

Affiliate Program
An affiliate program is nothing more than a joint venture between a company or private website owner, and a company that wants to promote a product. Basically, the company with the product provides the product, the web site, the customer service, the order handling and the fulfillment. But the company also gives the website owner a link so that when he refers clients to purchase its products, he earns a commission from every sale. The company wins because it has thousands of marketers all over the world recommending its products. The website owner wins by being paid to market the best products and services. In short, the marketer refers people to these sites and gets paid for any resulting sales. Even the biggest business players like Dell Computers use the advantages of affiliate programs.